Jack Mutant - Which Way Is Down (2)

There was no doubt he felt more grown-up as he approached his new school, Sandpools Academy; locals dropped the d and it was pronounced simply as Sanpools. The road had filled up now with juvenile figures, the boys in a great variety in heights, the girls much more like clones and animated with lively chit-chat, catching up after the holidays. A few singletons like Jack stood out, some scuttling with heads down, some with measured strides and a fake confidence. The new intake had been informed on their induction day to wait under the science bridge, this was near the main entrance and easy to locate, the area now brimming with children. Jack spotted a familiar face; Cromwell Spruce, a boy from his old school who had planned to attend a private school but his dad had been jailed for some kind of complicated fraud involving miracle bedsocks. Cromwell was leaning against a wall and like most of the kids without friends to stand with, he was staring into his very expensive phone. It was difficult being alone in such a crowd so Jack walked over very slowly and stood about one meter from his acquaintance, nodding in his direction. The boy looked up from his phone. ‘Oh - what you doing here, thought you’d have passed for the grammar?’

Jack shrugged, yes I should be with the elves, he thought but I’m not, I’m here with you and the rest of the awks. ‘I didn’t…...get on with the exam,’ he said.

‘Stupid questions for weirdos that’s why,’ Cromwell had a ridiculously deep voice for an eleven year old and the sound of it made other children stop and look over at them. ‘We’ll be laughing here, you’ll see, you get to keep your phone all day, hardly any homework, out at three, teachers don’t know you and don’t care who you are. I was meant to go to posh coats before….before it all blew up.’ Suddenly he looked up, beyond Jake’s shoulder and a broad smile flashed across his face, ‘Mason, hey Mason!’ he shouted and strode off into the crowd.

Jack was alone again, there was nowhere to look except at faces;  “Faces, faces everywhere, it’s hard not to look and I don’t want to stare but there’s was not a blade of grass or a leaf on a tree to be seen anywhere”. He repeated this little rhyme over and over in his head then took his phone out of his pocket just to feel normal and stared down at the screen. There was a text from Mum, ‘Don’t forget to speak!’ That kind of message was bound to sever the connection between brain and vocal cords but still he had nothing else to look at. The white noise of hundreds of children chatting was cut by the sound of a bell, rung manually by Mr Knight the deputy head. Behind him stood a little group of teachers and as each form was called out the children followed their teacher in turn back to their own form room.

Mr Graham was easy to spot, being so tall and thin. His inner pain seemed stronger than ever he grimaced as his form was called out, his face wrinkling up like a walnut. It was as if an invisible force was stabbing needles into the most sensitive part of his body. He hates us already, thought Jack as the man led his thirty or so charges away down some steps, across a playground, through some double doors, down a corridor, past some toilets and finally into a room with huge maps on the wall. There were three horizontal lines of tables all pushed together. Jack experienced a flash of deja vu, it was familiar, like he’d been there before, perhaps in a dream, he tried hard to recall it, how did it end? There were asked to find a seat anywhere they liked but they all ended up squashed together, there was little space and he so wanted to be at the end but instead he was right in the middle, hemmed in, trapped. He looked down, counted his fingers and the fingers of the people on either side of him, thirty fingers in total, everything is okay, this calmed him for now.

‘Right, we all know why we’re here,’ said Mr Graham, his voice dragging with apathy despite being only one day into the new school year. ‘This is a school, an academy no less, a centre..for learning, for academic excellence. When I was here in the seventies it was a secondary modern.’ He looked up to the ceiling, took a deep breath and continued. ‘And then, just as now, schoooools must have ruuuuuules and if you don’t know the ruuuuuuuules then you won’t learn much will you and the point of being at schooooooool is to……..learn and if you don’t want to learn then you must not impede those who wish to do so.’ He placed his long fingers on the desk in front of him and made them do a little dance before continuing. ‘So, assuming that you are all appropriately dressed in the correct uniform we shall now do the register.’

Mr Graham said all this without once looking at the children, he wouldn’t have noticed had a blue- suited elf gatecrashed the class. He ticked off the names as the children answered with a simple, yes. Jack tried to make his voice strong and deep. A pile of timetables was plopped down in front of a girl in the front row and Mr Graham asked her to hand them out. There were unfamiliar subjects; drama, business studies.

‘What’s modern studies?’ whispered the tiny boy with curly hair who was seated next to Jake.

Jack resisted the urge to just shrug. ‘Not sure,’ he said as quietly as possible while wondering, now that this theme had formed inside his head, if the boy was in fact a hobbit. Briefly he imagined Mr Graham dressed as Gandalf but the image quickly dissolved since his new form tutor didn’t appear to exude any wisdom at all. How he missed his grandad.

Their first lesson was art with Miss Brown, fruit drawing, it sounded pleasant enough until they were asked to shade with pencils, as accurately as possible, the shadows cast by apples in front of them on the desk. It was both difficult and boring. The tiny boy and Jack, for no other reason except that they were seated together during register, now stuck together for morning lessons. His name was Chris and seemed alright in that he was fairly quiet and not prone to showing off or at least good at holding back that urge when around new people. They queued for half an hour at lunchtime to get chips which were like slimy albino worms, killed first by the application of salt. The dining hall wrung with children’s voices. Jack struggled with the noise, the unpredictable nature of children, fresh out the cages of the classroom, pushing, jostling, shouting, the sounds bouncing off the walls. Chris chatted but he could barely separate what the boy said from the general noise of the dinner hall so he just nodded occasionally in agreement.

In the afternoon they mixed with the rest of their half of the year for a tour of the PE facilities. Jack was put in a group with three girls all named Emily and all bossy except one especially bossy, he named her Emily Central and did what she asked. They were given the task of taking down a mountain of gym mats and re-assembling them in a neat pile. The dust got on his hands and in his lungs, it tasted of socks.